Taxonomy? Folksonomy? Nodes? Classes? Help me unlease it all please!

Hi!

I'm working on a couple of comminity sites myself, and the way I've done it is to use the Organic Groups module to give me my main groups, and I've set up a very simple taxonomy so that each group has it's own vocabulary, and a taxonomy term from thast vocabulary has to selected when creating content.

This allows me to use the Views module to organise the content by displaying only nodes from a particular group with a particular taxonomy term.

I'd suggest you experiment; the key to it (for me at least) is using Views...

I'm sure other people will have other ideas, but that's my twopenn'orth.

Pete.

Alright, let me give this a go. Taxonomy is a very powerful tool, partly because there are so many modules based on it, extending it's capabilities.

Taxonomy is a way to categorize your nodes. When you create a new vocabularies, you need to specify Types: the page types that can contain a term from this vocabulary. This becomes particularly important when using flexinode or CCK to define your own node types beyond the initial page, story, and image. You also need to specify whether you want the terms in that vocabulary to have Hierarchy, and if so, should it be single or multiple. Free tagging allow for users to type in the vocabulary terms instead of choosing them from a drop down list when creating nodes. Multiple Select allows for users to select more than one term from that vocabulary for a given node. Required allows you to force any node of the specified types to have at least one term for that vocabulary specified.

From the sound of it, you may need just one vocalubary with 3 terms: Resources, Community, and Users.
It may also be that you want to have terms/subsections of each of these, so you would want 3 vocabularies with how ever many terms in each.

Once you have decided upon and set up your taxonomy structure, you can use the Taxonomy Access module to allow/disallow access to nodes based a given term or set of terms. You can also theme nodes based on taxonomy. You can set up breadcrumbs based on your taxonomy, and much more. Just look at all the Taxonomy Something modules here: http://drupal.org/project/Modules

So Taxonomy is not just a site structure, it is a way to gain certain functionalities based on that categorization of your nodes.

Simply put, taxonomy is all about classification at its' core level.

The biggest reason why it's so confusing is because it's so open ended. It won't dictate how you have to organize your site as Joomla does. The language used is new and the explanations around here don't make meaningful connections making it worse. I'm not sure if my explanation will make any more sense but..

It's not about hierarchy. It isn't about any one thing since you can implement the taxonomy system in unlimited ways. If you want to create a hierarchy you can. From the most basic to the most mind numbing, it's all possible.

Here are some very basic ideas.

1. Vocabulary = container for any group of terms with its' own rules.
2. terms = individual categories. They can be linear or structured in a hierarchy.
3. A vocabulary must be assigned to your node types so you can make the connection from a term (category) to a node of a particular type. Multiple vocabularies can be assigned to multiple node types.
4. Multi-select means you can assign more than one term to a node from the vocabulary that has it enabled. Why? Because some things are not easily defined by a single term.
5. Free tagging lets you create your own terms in a freeform manner. New terms can be entered as the node is being created. Works great if your constantly adding new terms but generally not good for general users as it can be abused. Must be linear.

Why the options? Well, I wouldn't worry about it and just try experimenting. If your needs are simple then keep it simple. Understand the system as you go and think about how you want your site structured then implement it.

For example, In my site there is no structure. I just have a single vocabulary where I use free tagging to categorize each node as I go. It works for me. Definitely not for a community site though.

You could create a single vocabulary with multiple hierarchies with the 3 sections at the top level and branch out your categories from there. Or create 3 vocabularies with their own rules if the 3 sections will be structured differently.. You can do it any way you please.

Here's some extra reading. Some of it is just more confusing jargon but check it out anyway. Especially the sub-pages.

http://drupal.org/node/299

–joon

Maybe by examples is easier to understand some of the applications of taxonomy.

This is a world banknote (hobbyist) site and we ask questions like give me all the banknotes issues by guyana, africa region, etc. Look at the urls and see the taxonomies. It also uses a taxonomy browser.

http://3833.com/region_america/

Scroll down, put your cursor and look at the (countries) link, click it and it 'pulls' the tagged info.